Skip to main content
Main

Baked Egg with Cheese

A baked egg dish topped with cheese and seasoned with cream, butter, salt, pepper, parsley, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Baked Egg with Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the base

  1. In a baking dish, combine the cream and butter; warm it slightly.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, parsley, and lemon juice.

Bake

  1. Carefully break the eggs into the dish.

  2. Sprinkle the grated cheese over the eggs.

  3. Bake for 20 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set to a tender custard-like texture as they cook in the warm cream.
Cream
Provides moisture and richness, keeping the eggs soft rather than dry.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the cream base.
Cheese
Melts and browns over the top, adding savory flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds a touch of acidity that brightens the rich cream and eggs.

The step that matters

Carefully break the eggs into the dish. Eggs set quickly once they meet heat, so keeping yolks intact and spacing them evenly helps them cook uniformly and stay tender rather than overcooking at the edges.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like